‘Well. She’ll come round.’

‘I don’t care. All that property talk is so boring. And immoral. You’d agree with me if she weren’t your sister.’

‘And she’d probably like you more if you didn’t act like such a superior cunt to her.’

*

After that argument finished we went out for dinner and when we came back we continued to avoid talking about what had happened with Antonio by having a debate in bed about gender, inspired by a Facebook thread I was reading over her shoulder which discussed an article about ‘Books No Woman Should Read’. It was nothing to get annoyed about, dashed off in response to a dull compilation of ‘great novels’ by men published in Esquire magazine that didn’t include the words ‘by men’, and the tone of the article that everyone was discussing seemed intentionally glib, in keeping with the hack work it was attacking and parodying, though the people commenting on it took it as literal, the law. Eager men who were keen to demonstrate they did not hate all women joined in the conversation to announce that they would never read a book by Saul Bellow or John Updike, not never again, but never at all.

I made the mistake of wondering out loud to Sophie whether one of the great damages men might have done to women was to make it natural for them to believe anything bad that is said about men. All the arrogant explaining which many of us have been guilty of, the complacent interruptions, the forceful articulation of our perspective on things – the existence of this recognised to the extent that it is impossible to disagree about an overstatement of the case without seeming to prove the overstated case itself.

‘And this aspect of gender inequality is most pressing, is it?’ asked Sophie.

‘I knew you were going to say that!’ I said. ‘It’s rhetorical brilliance. Now I feel like I’m deeply sexist for mentioning it. So all I can do is shut up.’

‘Why don’t you? Or you could read the whole book by her instead of getting annoyed by what some idiots say on Facebook about one article? Practise what you preach?’

‘Fine!’ I said. I took the book off her shelf, made a show of finding a pencil, lay down next to her and started reading.

*